Editorial: Leave national monuments untouched

President Donald Trump has taken a monumentally bad idea and made it worse by shrouding it in secrecy.

The president should let go of his misguided notion that reducing the size of three or more national monuments would benefit the nation by opening them up to logging, grazing and oil and gas drilling.

The potential damage to national treasures is immense, while the economic gains are seen by a majority of economists as minimal, at best.

Four months ago Trump asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review more than two dozen national monuments designated by presidents over the last two decades. Zinke floated the idea and opened it for public comment.

Nearly 3 million Americans told the White House what they thought of it: 99.2 percent were strongly opposed. That didn’t deter Zinke. He submitted a report last week recommending the reduction of the size of at least three national monuments — but chose to keep the details from the public.

Coward.

Zinke and Trump have no valid case for shrinking national monuments, but here’s their likely reason. It was President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton who expanded the three sites in question. Trump is obsessed with erasing their legacies, particularly in environmental protection.

The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, was specifically designed to protect public land from commercial exploitation. Since then, presidents from both parties have designated 200 national monuments.

Trump sees this as a “massive federal land grab” and says “it’s time to end these abuses and return control to the people.”

“The people” in this case means business and industry — the Citizens United sense of “people.” The actual public will lose the benefits of the land opened for exploitation.

At the top of the list of monuments Zinke recommends downsizing is the Bears Ears National Monument, home to cliff dwellings, prehistoric villages and rock art panels of ancestral Pueblo Indians in Utah. Obama designated it at the very end of his presidency. The other two are Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

A study released earlier this year by Headwaters Economics, a non-partisan economic research firm based in Bozeman, Mont., examined the economic effects of public lands being designated as national monuments.

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The study “found no evidence that designating these national monuments prevented continued economic growth. Instead, trends in key economic indicators such as population, employment, personal income, and per-capita income either continued or improved in each of the regions surrounding the national monuments.”

All three of the national monuments that Zinke wants to shrink are breathtaking in their beauty.

And remember we still don’t know the fate of our own 330,000-acre Lake Berryessa Snow Mountain region, which Woodland-based Tuleyome fought so long and hard for. We have been asking ourselves what use Trump and his minions could find for the Snow Mountain region other than timber harvesting or mining? Neither of those alternatives sounds appealing.

Meanwhile, Bob Schneider, senior policy director with Tuleyome, has called the review a “sham.” In his unvarnished words: “This entire sham review occurred behind closed doors; was capricious and a charade; with a generally predetermined political outcome. It is patently illegal.”

Schneider said the Snow Mountain region is “renowned as the best place in the world to see the geology and processes of plate tectonic; biological diversity; wildlife connectivity; Native American prehistory; historic mercury mining; water diversions; farming and ranching pioneering; continentwide geographic surveys; and other stories.” We agree.

Environmentalists will fight this outrage, and we will cheer them on. But what a shame it may be necessary, despite the overwhelming support of Americans for these treasures.